I was entrusted with the task to try and migrate a VM from Xen 3.2 to ESX. Well you would think that is a trivial task – it should be. But let us not forget that we are talking here about version 3.2, which is two generations back from the current Citrix Xensource which is in use today. After successfully migrating it I would like to share with you the procedure. This was done on a Xen Guest VM runnning Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 3 (Taroon Update 7)

Snapshot files are stored in the directory where the <VMname>.vmx file exists.

If you have limited space on the LUN where the <VMname>.vmx file exists, it may be necessary to specify an alternate location for the delta files that are created when you take snapshots of a VM.

Solution

This can be accomplised by defining an alternative working directory in the <VMname>.vmx for the VM. The side effect of defining an alternative working directory is that the swap file will also be created in the alternative location.

Note: It may not be necessary to remove from inventory and add back into inventory, but in repro this produced consistent results.

You cannot use the advanced edit setting feature in VirtualCenter to add this line to the <VMname>.vmx file and have this take effect.

Note: This appears to only work as expected when you edit the .vmx file directly.

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And

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Datastores no longer available during upgrade

KB Article 1008031

Updated Jan. 25, 2009

Products

VMware Lab Manager

Product Versions

VMware Lab Manager 3.0.x

Symptoms

Cannot complete an upgrade from Lab Manager 2.x to 3.x.

Required VMFS datastores no longer available.

An error is received while upgrading Lab Manager from version 2.x to 3.x after specifying VirtualCenter credentials in the configuration wizard.

The wizard does not proceed forward until each unavailable datastore is deleted from the configuration.

Resolution

This issue occurs when the credentials you gave for VirtualCenter do not have sufficient permissions to access the datastores and other required objects.

To verify the permissions, connect to VirtualCenter using the same credentials specified in the Lab Manager configuration wizard. If you are not able to see the configured hosts, clusters, or datastores, you must reconfigure the account privileges to make these objects accessible, or use a different account.

For more information on configuring VirtualCenter permissions, see the Basic System Administration guide, specifically the Managing Users, Groups, Permissions, and Roles section.

I know a lot of small shops that could find this very interesting, so I wanted to share this blog.

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There have been a couple of postings recently by people who have spent some time custom building PC’s capable of running VMWare ESX. A great example is Eric Sloof who has built a monster white box capable of running the new VI4 Beta software.

That’s got me interested in building one, perhaps to road test new features if I can ever get invited to participate in a VMWare beta program, or perhaps just to run ESX 3.5i so I can play about with new Microsoft Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 Beta.

One of the main issues with building a whitebox is ensuring compatibility with the VMWare HCL, so where on earth do you start looking so you can ensure your whitebox works. Well I’ve put togethere some links together to get you started, I hope they’re of some help.

This post is just under a year old but still contains some good information.

Now HP were doing some crazy deals on their HP ML tower server range last year. I was having a look at servers direct in the UK today and the prices are pretty good, I’m tempted to buy one of these rather than build a solution from scratch.

So how have people got on with ESX on the HP ML Series server? Well here are a few more links that may help.

Virtual VCP has put this article together detailing the changes required to get ESX 3.5 working on the new ML115 G5 servers.

Thing to remember with all whiteboxes are they are not supported by VMWare and you will be relying on the VMWare community to help you out with any problems. My advice is, if someone has listed the exact components that worked for them, copy it as it will most likely work for you.

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I think that a White box is the way to go for testing, and I think it is great that people are blogging about their experiences and or where to start the process when building these.

Was working a customer case where they were having issues with VMotion and Control Center. Control Center is one of the only Storage Resource Management tools with tons of VMware integration – and has had it for more than a year.

Ok, Control Center has active discovery (i.e. agent) and passive discovery mechanisms (i.e. leverage an API). Most VMware-integrated features use the passive mechanism – basically ControlCenter has a VM-proxy (i.e. a host which can be a VM that has software that queries the ESX CIM API and the VC APIs). Some customers want more. For example, they want file-level reporting for chargeback and analysis WITHIN the VM. Or, they want drill-downs into databases in VMs. These require agents to run inside the VM if you want that (again, ESX-layer chargeback, utilization reports, thin provisioning use, performance and VMDK->Datastore->LUN/filesystem->backend details – those have no agent requirement).

So, the problem only arises when ControlCenter components running on a guest systems (ergo agents to provide file-level reporting or application integration) are Vmotioned and ControlCenter has discovered the ESX server hosting the VMs that those ControlCenter components are running on.

The root cause is that the ControlCenter store component incorrectly interprets a Vmotion activity as a deletion of a VM (i.e. at the ESX CIM level, the VM just disappeared, and requires correlation at the VC layer). That deletion is not allowed by other rules within the ControlCenter repository and the discovery of the ESX server fails resulting in stale data in ControlCenter and sometimes corruption to ControlCenter component configuration data.

We just released a hotfix for this problem for EMC Control Center 6.1 (HF4486) and will be releasing one for 6.0 shortly (HF4485).

This primus case contains more information regarding the problem. emc203588

Some of our client devices have a need to do a daily reboot, and I didn’t feel like manly setting up a scheduled task on each device. I needed something I could run via login script or USB stick, that only takes a couple of seconds of time per device.

Therefore, with some help from the Internet I developed the following.

Copy the above line and paste it into notepad, or your text editor of choice, and save it as a .bat file.

This will set the device you run this on, to make a new scheduled task, which is daily reboot at 12:15 , which is run as system, with a 60 sec count down. Admin rights are required to create this task.

More and more of my new implementations of VMware Infrastructure are being connected to iSCSI SANs (EMC, LeftHand, and Equallogic) and the question has come up about whether or not to spend extra dollars on TOE (TCPIP Offload Engine) Network cards. The TOE cards take the burden of processing iSCSI packets away from the host’s CPU and place it on the Network Interface Card itself. In theory this should speed performance of the host machine. For ESX implementations, VMware has provided a very solid software iSCSI initiator that I have been using with great regularity. I’ve become curious if others are using TOE cards in their environments or just using the straight SW solution.

Most of the compatible cards seem to be in the $1000 dollar range while most 1GB Network cards seem to be in the $200 range. Due to the high costs of these TOE Cards, I am curious to know if anyone is receiving the expected performance increases to justify the higher costs and if it is at all worth the price and effort of putting the TOE cards in.

If you have any experiences with TOE cards in ESX environments, please let me know your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!

I’m lazy and need to import all my users phone, fax, department, title and company into active directory. I’m looking for a free or near free tool to update user account information in active directory. This way I can have the users or our secretary do the input. A quick Google search yielded some possibilities but I wanted to see if anyone had any experience with this.Also is there a way to give all users in a certain domain and group similar information like company or department? This way if I decide to type this in manually I would only have to input 3 fields of data not 5.